Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i Fine Art Connoisseur

Twenty years ago, this magazine was born of a passion for realism, at a moment when representational painting, drawing, and sculpture were not on the art world's radar. They were considered passé and unnecessary to emulate, or even to consult. At that time, though, we observed a taste for them emerging among younger artists — one last hope for the centuries-old tradition of aesthetic baton-passing from master to apprentice through the generations. We sought the continuation of this time-honored method of accurate rendering, precise drawing, and deft execution in paint or clay. Instead of seeing images of the past reproduced, we hoped all these newly welltrained artists would apply their skills to contemporary subjects, to create images reflecting their own interests and times. For more than two decades, I've quoted…

The plein air paintings being created by BETHANN MORAN - HANDZLIK (b. 1965) are impressive not only for the amount of detail, vibrant color, and emotional content they capture but also for their sheer size, often averaging 50 inches in each direction. The Wisconsin artist does not paint small sketches outdoors to quickly gather information for larger studio landscapes. Rather, she completes almost the entire painting outdoors, sometimes spending weeks in the same spot to capture what she sees. Take This Joy Is Electric, for example, which found the artist standing along a busy highway in Whitewater, Wisconsin, for more than two weeks in order to compose this large scene of a sunflower field. “No doubt there are challenges to working on large canvases outside for a prolonged time,” Moran-Handzlik admits.…

TODAY'S MASTERS Artists think about every aspect of human life, often taking a hard look at things and activities the rest of us take for granted. A fine example is transportation: we all move around, but do we ever really stop to study the cars, planes, trains, boats, buses, trucks, or bicycles that make our movements possible? Fortunately, a lot of talented artists do just that on a regular basis, so here we present a sampling of the transport-related images we have enjoyed recently. In the future, please keep an eye on the programming offered by the American Society of Railway Artists and by the American Society of Marine Artists, whose members capture images of water, including vessels of all kinds. We have not yet found a comparable organization dedicated…

COLLECTOR PROFILE Ray and Lori Allen of San Diego have assembled a collection of contemporary realism that got its start through Ray's long-standing love of art. In high school, he took classes in drawing and sculpture that triggered this interest, and while he was studying at Chicago's DePaul University, it wasn't uncommon for a professor to ask if anyone had seen Ray. Usually the answer came back, “He's at the Art Institute” downtown. Today the Allens own works by such gifted artists as Richard Becker, Michael Bergt, Anna Chervonnaya, Claire DeLandro, Yuriy Dymshyts, Dan Ferguson, Geraldine Grove, Jacquline Hurlbert, Joan Irving, Lauretta Lowell, Peter Matosian, Willie McGrath, Daryl Millard, John Modesitt, Jacob A. Pfeiffer, Craig Pursley, Artem Rogowoi, Dennis Sarazhin, Jan Dorian Whitney, Will Wilson, and Jeanne Zvetina. Ray is…

COLLECTOR PROFILE Michael Mouser grew actively interested in art in 2011 when, fresh out of college, he bought a house and found himself with yards of blank wall space. He asked several artistic friends if they would create something, but none followed through, so Michael bought some supplies and began making his own paintings. He recalls, “I began to discover contemporary artists who were painting what I was trying to capture and realized they were much better at it than me.” In fact, Michael's first acquisition was not an original work, but a master copy of Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring painted by the French artist August Aupault in 2016. Michael found the copyist on eBay, and soon they became close friends, even meeting up in Pittsburgh (where…

INSIDE TRACK When was the last time you curled up on the sofa with a really good dictionary? Never? Dictionaries don't usually lend themselves to that kind of perusal. Reading straight through one could be described in Mark Twain fashion as “chloroform in print,” more likely to induce sleep than interest. But what about a dictionary dedicated to the best artists of a certain region — a region considered off the beaten track, yet curiously rich in ‘ ture and the visual arts? A book written by four eminent historians of art, with punchy entries on each artist? Surely a dictionary of this sort, adorned with 240 vibrantly colored illustrations, would garner more enthusiasm. We sure hope so. Published this past November, the Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists contains biographies…

EVENTS PREVIEW A NEW VIEW OF OLD ROME ROMAN LANDSCAPES San Antonio Museum of Art San Antonio samuseum.org through May 21 The San Antonio Museum of Art has long been admired for its superb collection of antiquities, and now it has organized — and is the sole venue for — a groundbreaking exhibition, Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii. This is the first show mounted in the U.S. to explore landscape scenes as a striking (and little studied) form of ancient Roman art. On view this spring are more than 65 examples of wall paintings, sculptures, mosaics, cameo glass, and silver vessels created in Roman Italy between 100 BCE and AD 250. These works have been gathered from around the world — including Italy, France, and…

TODAY'S MASTERS Founded in 1999 by the New Jersey collectors Fred, Sherry, and Kara Lysandra Ross with several of their fellow scholars, the Art Renewal Center (ARC) is a nonprofit educational foundation that encourages the re-emergence of traditional art and training techniques. The fruits of its labors are becoming ever more apparent as time goes by. ARC is probably best known to readers of Fine Art Connoisseur for its impressive website (artrenewal.org), which contains more than 80,000 images by Old Master, 19th-century, and early-20th-century artists, along with artist biographies and related articles. The site has evolved into an invaluable reference for anyone interested in historical realism. ARC is equally committed to bringing this rich heritage up to date by highlighting the booming field of contemporary realism. In addition to its…

HISTORIC MASTERS “Who does not know Carolus-Duran in America? He has had hosts of American pupils … and scores of American men and women have had their portraits painted by the master.”1 In 1913, when this statement appeared in a Texas newspaper, it was true that the French artist Carolus-Duran (born Charles Auguste Émile Durant, 1837–1917) had captured the interest of the American press from coast to coast.2 Once known as the “Prince of Elegants,” Carolus-Duran has nearly disappeared from art-historical consideration on this side of the Atlantic.3 In fact, his reputation in the United States is kept alive mainly by virtue of his role as John Singer Sargent's most important instructor, a status materially witnessed by Sargent's brilliant portrait of his French master that introduced the face of the…

COLLECTOR PROFILE Veda Barrie and Bob Weatherbee have visited more than 120 countries over the years, not only to go backpacking and mountain-climbing, but also to explore local museums and heritage sites. Not surprisingly, they have brought home to Utah a huge array of books, magazines, photographs, and art objects documenting the wonders they saw. Veda recalls, “Having viewed art in the best museums around the world, we started looking closer to home for paintings to live with.” Their first acquisition was the painting by Valoy Eaton illustrated here. Created in 1985, it depicts two boys passing a farmhouse while walking along a muddy road. Veda recalls, “It just hit home. I am from an Idaho farm family and have two sons. Bob is from a Massachusetts dairy farm background.…

COLLECTOR PROFILE Charles Raskob Robinson and Barbara Paul Robinson are the proud owners of over 50 artworks created by Fellows of the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA). A Fellow himself, Charlie Robinson is a lifelong sailor. From 1968 to 1986, he served as a vice president at Bankers Trust in Manhattan. When he learned of a company program in which secretaries and clerks could take painting classes after office hours, he enrolled, too. After years of study, and a daily routine of rising at 5 a.m. to paint before work and attend the Art Students League of New York in the evening, Charlie resigned to create marine art full-time. Although it dates back to the Egyptians and Greeks, marine art as we know it arose in the Netherlands during…

BEHIND THE SCENES When David Cobb Craig was growing up during the 1960s and ‘70s in Oak Grove, Louisiana, a small town he describes as “being as far away from New Orleans as you can go and still be in Louisiana,” he would mail letters so that he could receive some back in kind. He knew that, having written to state tourism boards or pen pals or authors he admired, he would receive replies in envelopes affixed with colorful, graphic stamps, which he would cut off and paste into a voluminous scrapbook, a volume he still peruses — and adds to — in his Manhattan apartment. “I always loved the mail because it was a cheap way to travel somewhere as a kid without having to spend more than 8…

Go Tell Alice Judith Linhares (b. 1940) 2022, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 26 in. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W., New York City Ever since Dennis Elliott met the artist Judith Linhares in 1978, he has followed her work, along with the white rabbit she has frequently included in her paintings. Like Alice who chased that animal down the hole into Wonderland, Elliott, a prolific artist himself as well as the founder of the International Curatorial Studio Program (ICSP), has followed the progression of scenes Linhares paints and produces in her Brooklyn studio. “Much of her work is a bit like what you'd find in Wonderland, as if Lewis Carroll might have constructed his stories in paint,” says Elliott, who in 1994 founded ICSP, an influential nonprofit which,…

TODAY'S MASTERS In our digital era — when Instagram dictates how people should look — most portraiture has become an avatar, mainstreamed prettiness, slick and smooth, without imperfections. Such imagery is reinforced and pressurized by films and advertising; the face has become an idealized representation of humanity in its most splendid mode. In this digital society, there is less and less room for reality in all its variety, with its extraordinary kinds of beauty that make our world so colorful and diverse. Yet it is exactly that kaleidoscope of ravishing difference that can open us to mutual tolerance, to embracing the fact that every phase of life offers its own splendor and attractiveness. It is likely that the desire to portray others came about at the same moment people began…

HIST IC M T S There probably is no way to think about the life and career of painter Abigail “May” Alcott (1840–1879) without reference to her older sister and her father. The former, author Louisa May Alcott, fictionalized May as Amy March in the much-loved novel Little Women (1868–69), which all too frequently is treated as a true-tolife account of the Alcott family. (Orchard House, their home in Concord, Massachusetts, is seen today as a shrine by many visitors, who look around it imagining where every event in the novel took place.) May's father, Bronson Alcott, comes to mind because his eccentric, profligate ways caused the privation on which his wife and daughters struggled to put a good face. Indeed, much of the power of Little Women stems from…

COLLECTOR PROFILE Celeste and Graham Gilles were both raised in California by parents who owned, in her words, “beautiful contemporary plein air art, so for us to start collecting and appreciating it together was easy.” Celeste particularly recalls admiring a tonalist nocturne painted by the California master Granville Redmond (1871–1935), which depicts Lover's Cove on Catalina Island. Her maternal greatgrandparents had purchased it directly from Redmond to “help out their artist friend,” as they were all part of the deaf community in Los Angeles. Today most of Celeste and Graham's artworks depict Catalina Island, where her family has a long history, or Laguna Beach; a few are related to another scenic area nearby, Santa Barbara. All, Celeste says, are “locations we love and appreciate.” Represented in their collection today are…

ART IN THE WEST GO, COWGIRLS WICKENBURG, ARIZONA westernmuseum.org March 31–September 3 The Desert Caballeros Western Museum is much admired for preserving and exhibiting the art and history of the Southwest and desert frontier. Eighteen years ago, it launched Cowgirl Up! Art from the Other Half of the West, an invitational exhibition and sale that — in the male-dominated field of Western art — has turned the spotlight squarely on women's perspectives. CU! remains a leading national event for women artists, and its 18th edition will feature more than 55 emerging and established talents, selected from over 300 applicants. Their paintings, drawings, and sculptures are made in a range of techniques, styles, and mediums. This year's exhibition is divided into two galleries: one of “miniatures” and the other of full-sized…

BEHIND THE SCENES “Textiles are a cornerstone of material culture for all societies,” says Janina Poskrobko, Ph.D., conservator in charge of the Department of Textile Conservation at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just to be clear, “textile” applies to a wide variety of woven, knotted, and compressed materials made from fibrous and synthetic substances. They include tapestries, carpets, embroideries, velvets, laces, hand- and machine-printed fabrics, costumes, three-dimensional accessories, and much more. Poskrobko continues, “Our department has developed innovative methods for conserving, storing, and exhibiting textiles from a wide range of cultures, from early archeological finds to contemporary production. The object-based research integral to conservation work provides important primary-source information critical to the correct placement of a textile in its historical context.” It has been a remarkable journey to…

ARTISTS & GALLERIES Knoxville, Tennessee americanimpressionistsociety.org and thedistrictgallery.com April 14–May 20 The American Impressionist Society will soon host its 7th Annual AIS Impressions Small Works Showcase at Knoxville's District Gallery. On view will be 150 works in oil, watercolor, pastel, gouache, and acrylic, selected by a five-member jury from 1,615 submissions. Visitors will also see an additional 20 paintings created by AIS Masters, Board, Officers, and Founders. During the opening reception on April 14, awards judge Anne Blair Brown (an AIS Master) will present more than $15,000 in prizes. That opening week (April 11–15) will also feature a museum tour, panel discussion, paint-out, and critiques; Brown will teach two workshops and paint in a dual demo with Signature Member Kathie Odom. New York City americantonalistsociety.com and salmagundi.org April 28 – May 7…